Stockton Hills Mine
Nearly a week has passed since my return from the West. I revisited in my mind our hike to the site of the old silver mine, the abandoned Stockton Hills Mine.
“Stockton the liveliest mining camp in Mohave county” is written in the old records of the area. The mines played out, as did the town of Stockton. Silver was discovered in the early 1860s. The site of the old mine was once a tent “city” of hundreds of men. Women? Hard to imagine, but surely some were present. The photo is of an old metal sided building, boarded up. That’s the only structure still standing. The rest are residue, piles of timbers, decaying slowly in the moisture scarce desert. It was quiet there as the three of us walked, — we once stopped walking to sample the stillness. Once in a while a bird call was heard.
It is hard to imagine the commands and shouts from men, groaning machinery, fashioned of wood retrieving the silver ore from the underground shaft. Piles of ore were transported by heavy duty mule-train wagons.
We discovered the foundations for the camp meeting house, which I understand was taken by fire at some point. Someone before me had arranged an arc of bottle fragments fused by the heat, upon the surface of a rock. I did not touch the glass. It seemed a fitting memorial, to the passage of what once was, and on a larger scale to the passage of more civilizations than we know that have come before us. It is as it should be, or so it seems to me.
As the mines played out, so did the town… The silence returns.
